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Downloads expire after December 2023

DVD QUALITY VIDEO:
Astro Boy

Astro Boy
Pilot Episode / 1963

Astro Boy (known in Japan as Mighty Atom) premiered on Fuji TV on New Year’s Day in 1963. It was immensely popular and established many of the concepts that later became known to be a part of the Anime style. Created by Osama Tezuka, the story was originally told in the form of manga comics which were published beginning in 1951 and continuing for three decades. Tezuka was influenced for the design of Astro Boy by Mickey Mouse, and you can see gags in the circus parade sequence that have been lifted from Fleischer cartoons.

The animation in this pilot episode is a model of economy. Notice how exposition is covered quickly in a series of quick static images, and how most of the focus is on the personality of the characters. Much of the animation consists of repeating 4, 8 and 16 frame cycles, but occasionally a sophisticated bit of personality animation or an expressive walk cycle is sprinkled in to keep things alive. Even though there are fewer drawings than in most animated films and TV shows, the drawings in Astro Boy are particularly well executed. Compositions, expressions and character posing is all first rate, and many of them are funny as well. The timing of the effects animation is worth studying for the way it cleverly reuses drawings without becoming too repetitive.

Independent animators would be well served to analyze the techniques used in this program. Many of the ideas for streamlining the storytelling and reusing drawings directly apply to the tight schedules required for internet cartoon series. We hope you find this to be useful in your own work.

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Downloads expire after December 2023

HD QUALITY VIDEO:
Heckle and Jeckle

Heckle & Jeckle in "Sno Fun"
Terry-Toons / Eddie Donnelly (Dir) / 1951

During the early 1950s, Terry-Toons was suffering from a lack of inspiration when it came to coming up with premises for cartoons. They recycled stories from cartoons they had made decades earlier and even appropriated ideas from other studios. "Sno Fun" unashamedly imitates Tex Avery’s "Northwest Hounded Police" made five years earlier, substituting Heckle & Jeckle for Droopy and a French Canadian bulldog for the wolf.

But even though the story and gags are unimaginative, the animation is truly inspired. Jim Tyer animates the lion’s share of this cartoon and he successfully turns lead into gold. Tyer had his own sense for distorting the characters to anticipate big actions and makes tired gags seem fresh.

This particular video transfer was provided to Animation Resources by our Advisory Board member Steve Stanchfield and it is a revelation, because Terry-Toons usually look faded and grainy- but this 35mm print is sharp and clear with bright colors. This allows you to analyze Tyer’s animation frame by frame. Choose a scene that makes you laugh and break it down… study the drawings and timing. Notice how Tyer uses repeating rhythmic cycles of rolling eyes or flapping mouths to heighten the comedy. Volumes change depending on the need of the movement. His animation is less about moving characters through space than it is expressing movement through the characters. That is a totally different way of thinking about how to animate a film.

Many thanks to Steve Stanchfield for sharing so many treasures with us.

Click to access the…

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Downloads expire after December 2023

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Fall is time to save when you join Animation Resources as a student member. For the next couple of weeks our Student Membership will be discounted to only $60/year! Best of all, you will continue to get that savings every year you renew as a student for up to three years. Yes, this applies to full time educators too. Why should you join? Each day we’ll be highlighting more reasons why you should be a member of Animation Resources. Bookmark us and check back every day.

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Not Convinced Yet? Check out this SAMPLE REFERENCE PACK! It will give you a taste of what Animation Resources members get to download every other month!

There’s no better way to feed your creativity than to be a member of Animation Resources. Every other month, we share a Reference Pack that is chock full of downloadable e-books and still framable videos designed to expand your horizons and blow your mind. It’s easy to join. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online.

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Friday, December 16th, 2022

RefPack049: A Peek At The Featured Downloads

People who aren’t members of Animation Resources don’t understand how comprehensive our Reference Packs are. Over the next couple of weeks, we will be posting what each section of our current RefPack looks like, starting today with the Featured section. If you are a member of Animation Resources, click on this post to go to the Members Only page. If you aren’t a member yet, today is the perfect time to join! Our current Reference Pack is one of our best yet, and General and Student Members get access to a special Bonus Archive with even more material from past Reference Packs.

What are you waiting for?

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Every other month, Animation Resources shares a new Reference Pack with its members. They consist of an e-book packed with high resolution scans and video downloads set up for still frame study. Make sure you download the Reference Pack before it’s updated. When it’s gone, it’s gone!

REFPACK048: October / November 2022
PDF E-BOOK

Willy Pogany’s Mother Goose

1928
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Willy Pogany was born in Hungary in 1882, and studied at Budapest Technical University, as well as schools in Munich and Paris. He was unable to make much of an impact as an artist in Paris after two years of study and work, so he relocated to London, where there was a great demand for book illustrators. His first success was with The Welsh Fairy Book by T. Fischer Unwin, to which he contributed over 100 designs. For the next decade, he worked as an illustrator in London, producing over a dozen books, including his highly regarded editions of Faust, Norse Mythology, Tan-glewood Tales, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and collections of Hungarian and Turkish fairy tales.

Pogany is best known for his work on illustrated book adaptations of Richard Wagner’s operas, Lohengrin, Parsifal and Tannhauser, as well as a book of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Unlike other book illustrators of the time, Pogany took an active part in the selection of papers and bookbinding of his books, framing his illustrations with calligraphic borders, hand lettering and using toned papers that set off the drawings.

In 1914, Pogany emigrated to the United States, where he started out illustrating covers for Harper’s Weekly, Ladies Home Journal and Town and Country. His fame as an illustrator of Wagner led to a position at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where he designed scenery and costumes. In 1934, he went to work on movies in Hollywood designing sets in the Art Deco style for Busby Berkeleys Dames. At Walter Lantz’s animation studio, he designed a character named Peterkin Pan. Pogany was also a well known painter and muralist, doing commissions for celebrities like John Ringling, Douglas Fairbanks, William Randolph Hearst and Enrico Caruso, among others. In his retirement, he created three art instructional books on drawing, oil panting and watercolors. He died in New York in 1955.

In 1929, Pogany designed a book of Mother Goose rhymes for children. Heavily influenced by Art Deco, this edition is unique in several ways. Pogany didn’t utilize standard text blocks. All of the rhymes are hand lettered and laid out on the page in imaginative ways that accent the rhythms and illustrations. In contrast with his earlier work, the printing and binding is unremarkable; and his illustrations, while perfectly adequate, do not display the degree of flashy draftsmanship of his earlier work. His audience here wasn’t the same as for his books based on opera and classical mythology.

The focus of this book is design, and the appeal is directly targeted at very young children. The book is made to be read out loud by a parent to a child sitting on their lap. With the turn of each page, the design of the spread changes, providing visual interest for children too young to read the words. While most illustrations of Mother Goose stick to traditional medieval costumes and settings, Pogany skillfully adapts the themes to a contemporary context to make them more relatable to modern children.

The copy of this book that we digitized wasn’t perfect… a text block on one page is damaged too badly to be corrected digitally, and a couple of color separations are printed out of register. But the genius of the design still shines through.

One note on our download of this book… One of the nursery rhymes includes racial stereotyping that is clearly unacceptable to modern readers. We are providing two downloads: one with the pages included, and one with them omitted. You can choose the download that you prefer.

REFPACK049: Pogany’s Mother Goose (With)

REFPACK049: Pogany’s Mother Goose (Without)

Adobe PDF File / 156 Pages / 485 MB Download

SD VIDEO:

Two Early Van Beuren Cartoons

Summer Time 1929 / The Office Boy 1930

Van Beuren cartoons are among the most misunderstood animated shorts from the golden age of animation. Armchair animation historians tend to have a certain set of criteria they judge by— either the polish and production values of Disney, or the carefully constructed gags of Tex Avery at Warner Bros and MGM. If you judge like that, Van Beuren cartoons fall far short, but that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to learn from these films.

Let’s start by looking at Van Beuren cartoons the way animation historians who aren’t cartoonists look at them… The style of drawing varies from shot to shot. The movement of characters is rubbery and completely devoid of any attention to anatomy. There’s no attempt to render perspective or depth except in the most crude and basic way. Most of the action takes place in a flat plane from right to left. Characters are two-dimensional and sometimes downright grotesque. Scene cuts don’t build to a gag— most gags are completely contained within a single scene. The next scene sets up and plays out a totally new gag. The overall structure of the continuity is extremely basic. In fact, the story of the cartoon can be completely described in a single sentence… “The boss flirts with the girl until his wife finds out.” Or in the case of “Summer Time” even more simply, “Stuff happens with Farmer Al Falfa and a bunch of mice.” All of these criticisms are true, and all of them completely miss the point.

Cartoonists and animators can totally misunderstand the appeal of these cartoons too. It’s de rigueure nowadays for every TV cartoon show to do a "retro episode" where the characters are drawn in old timey 1930s rubber hose style. They use a soundtrack full of ukulele music, rinky-tink jazz and Raymond Scott’s Powerhouse, not for any particular purpose beyond simple nostalgia. They’ll paint backgrounds with farmyards or city streets from the depression and color the cartoon in shades of black and white. Yet the results are always the same… Even though the new old fashioned cartoons look and sound like the cartoons of the 1930s, they just don’t feel anything like them.

Why is this? The answer is simple. Van Beuren cartoons aren’t good because they are carefully crafted and constructed like a Disney or Tex Avery cartoon. And they aren’t good because they are in black and white and have peppy jazz music. They are good because they were created by artists who were having FUN.

In order to appreciate these cartoons, you have to look beneath the surface. Their appeal isn’t in their style, it’s in the creative freedom they express. The animation in these Tom & Jerry cartoons was handed out to the animators scene by scene. The artists were given a general idea of what was supposed to happen between the cuts, but if they thought of a way to make it funnier, they were free to go with that. They weren’t laying bricks to create a foundation for other people to build on, they were going all out to make their own fifty feet of film as funny as they possibly could.

When the time came to string all the animators’ work together, a cursory hookup was all that was needed to transition from one animator’s section to the next. They weren’t building a symphony, they were competing in a jam session. Every animator was encouraged to improvise, without worrying about continuity, consistency or production value. And this competition for laughs ended up producing films that were jam packed with funny surprises. It’s no wonder that a one-of-a-kind animator like Jim Tyer started out his career at Van Beuren, and it’s no wonder that Van Beuren was the only studio who fully recognized Tyer’s creative spark and allowed him to direct.

So when you are looking at these films, look past the surface nostalgia and focus at what is going on behind the scenes. Think about applying this kind of freedom to your own films. Imagine how much fun it would be to work on a project where the only requirement is to produce approximately five minutes of animation on a simple theme… where the animators weren’t required to conform to a specific model, but instead were encouraged to create the funniest action possible in their own style. Who wouldn’t want to work like that?!

Van Beuren wasn’t the "worst cartoon studio in the golden age" as some people have described it. It was one of the few studios that gave its artists absolute freedom. Many thanks to Animation Resources Advisory Board Member Steve Stanchfield for sharing these rare films with us.

REFPACK049: Summer Time 1929

MP4 Video File / SD / 7:22 / 195 MB Download
REFPACK049: Office Boy 1930

MP4 Video File / HD / 8:10 / 148 MB Download
Many thanks to Steve Stanchfield from Thunderbean Animation for sharing these rare films with us.

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD A Sample RefPack!

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Check out this SAMPLE REFERENCE PACK! It will give you a taste of what Animation Resources members get to download every other month!

Animation Resources is a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization dedicated to providing self study material to the worldwide animation community. Every month, we sponsor a program of interest to artists, and every other month, we share a book and up to an hour of rare animation with our members. If you are a creative person interested in the fields of animation, cartooning or illustration, you should be a member of Animation Resources!

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Monday, December 12th, 2022

RefPack049: A Bumper Crop Of Incredible Inspiration

Every other month, Animation Resources shares a new Reference Pack with its members. They consist of e-books packed with high resolution scans video downloads of rare animated films set up for still frame study, as well as podcasts and documentaries— all designed to help you become a better artist. Make sure you download this Reference Pack before it’s updated. When it’s gone, it’s gone!

The latest Animation Resources Reference Pack has been uploaded to the server. Here’s a quick overview of what you’ll find when you log in to the members only page…

PDF E-BOOK

Willy Pogany’s Mother Goose

1928
Download this article

Willy Pogany is best known for his work on illustrated book adaptations of Richard Wagner’s operas, Lohengrin, Parsifal and Tannhauser, as well as a book of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In 1929, Pogany designed a book of Mother Goose rhymes for children. Heavily influenced by Art Deco, this edition is unique in several ways. Pogany didn’t utilize standard text blocks. All of the rhymes are hand lettered and laid out on the page in imaginative ways that accent the rhythms and illustrations.

Two Early Van Beuren Cartoons

Summer Time 1929 / The Office Boy 1930

Twelve Months

Ivan Petrovich Ivanov-Vano / Soyuzmultfilm, Russia / 1956
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This time Animation Resources shares another rare Russian animated feature, The Twelve Months. The quality of the animation in this film is every bit as good as what Disney was producing at the time. The animators at Soyuzmultfilm were masters at blending rotoscope footage and animation techniques to create realistic and nuanced acting and action. You won’t want to miss this one!

SD VIDEO:

Snowy Roads

Boris Dyozhkin / Soyuzmultfilm, Russia / 1963

In previous Reference Packs, we’ve featured the work of Boris Dyozhkin, and this time we are sharing one of his most brilliant films, "Snowy Roads." This film is a masterpiece of musical timing. Notice how the movement perfectly mirrors the rhythms in the music. Dyozhkin really gets the most out of the simple character designs by focusing on strong line of action, clear silhouettes and big contrasts. It’s a very appealing style of animation that seems much more modern than its six decade age.

SD VIDEO:

Two Czech Commercials

Johnnie Loves It Clean 1932 / The Unforgettable Poster 1937

Animation Resources’ digital archive recently received a batch of early Czechoslovakian animated films. Among them were these two animated commercials. We tend to think of commercials as being primarily from the television era, but in the 1930s, a great deal of advertising animation was produced for theaters. These two examples are interesting examples, and the illustrate how influential Disney and Fleischer cartoons were, even in Europe. I believe the two films we are sharing with you here are by Karel Dodal, who not only produced advertisements (some featuring Felix the Cat), but also puppet and experimental films.

SD VIDEO:

Professor Balthazar in "Lighthouse Keeping"

Zlatko Grgic / Zagreb Films, Croatia / 1967

In a previous Reference Pack we featured several Maxi-Cat mini-cartoons by Zlatko Grgic, a Croatian animator who later emigrated to Canada to join the Canadian Film Board. Grgic is best known for his series of cartoons featuring the character Professor Balthazar, an old man who solves problems for his friends by creating inventions with a magical machine. Produced between 1967 and 1973, the series ran all over the world. Its silent pantomime with voice over narration made it easy to translate to other countries It aired everywhere from New Zealand to Romania to Zimbabwe. In the United States it was featured on Chuck Jones’ television program, Curiosity Shop.

SD VIDEO:

Golden Bat

Curated by JoJo Baptista

Ep.16 / Ep.39 (1967)
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The character of Golden Bat goes as far back as 1930, and is, by some, considered to be the first superhero. He was created by Suzuki Ichiro and Takeo Nagamatsu, who named the character after a popular cigarette brand of the time. The character first appeared in "paper theater", a form of entertainment similar to a Punch and Judy show, but in 1967, it made the transition to television animation. There isn’t a lot of filler in this series. It’s wall to wall action most of the time. Golden Bat’s maniacal laughter is infectious. This series delivers exactly what kids in the 1960s wanted… giant monsters, superheroes, robots, evil villains and tons of stuff exploding into bits. Enjoy!

HD VIDEO:

Decasia

Bill Morrison 2002
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In this RefPack, we introduce a new section, Sidetracks. Inspiration for animated films doesn’t just come from other animated films. A lot can be gained from exposing yourself to music, dance, live action cinema and fine art. Even architecture can be a useful area to study. This time we are sharing a film that uses the decay of film as its subject matter, Decasia by Bill Morrison. This film is a collage of bits of silent films that show the ravages of time on nitrate film stock. As such, it acts as a symbol of our own all too human mortality. In the past we’ve shared experimental films by Len Lye and Norman McLaren that were created by adding abstract shapes to the surface of a strip of film. These rotting fragments accomplish much the same thing naturally without human intervention.

HD VIDEO:

More Morphs

Curated By David Eisman
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Animation Resources Board Member, David Eisman elaborates further on a subject he explored in a previous RefPack, morphs. Morphs are a broad and varied technique that houses multiple distinct subcategories. Nevertheless, it is necessary for the animator to understand each of these subcategories, if not be able to replicate the techniques in original work. Moreover, in order to successfully implement morphs, it is imperative to fully comprehend Line Efficiency and how the informal principle informs the difficulty and feasibility of the techniques in question.

BONUS DOWNLOADS:

Annual Member Bonus Archive

Available to Student and General Members

ANIMATION RESOURCES ANNUAL MEMBERS: Reference Pack 017 is now being rerun and is now available for download. It includes a PDF e-book of rare sports cartoons by Willard Mullin, two Cinemascope cartoons in their original aspect ratio (and high definition!) and a half hour of rare paper puppet films by Lotte Reiniger. These downloads will be available until December and after that, they will be deleted from the server. So download them now!

Click to access the…

Downloads expire after January 2022

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD A Sample RefPack!

Whew! That is an amazing collection of treasures! At Animation Resources, our Advisory Board includes great artists and animators like Ralph Bakshi, Will Finn, J.J. Sedelmaier and Sherm Cohen. They’ve let us know the things that they use in their own self study so we can share them with you. That’s experience you just can’t find anywhere else. The most important information isn’t what you already know… It’s the information you should know about, but don’t know yet. We bring that to you every other month.

Haven’t Joined Yet?

Check out this SAMPLE REFERENCE PACK! It will give you a taste of what Animation Resources members get to download every other month!

Animation Resources is a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization dedicated to providing self study material to the worldwide animation community. If you are a creative person working in animation, cartooning or illustration, you owe it to yourself to be a member of Animation Resources.